


Worldbuilding 15: A Day in the Life of Domino

by JoAsakura



Series: X-Force: Mutant Crimes Investigation Unit [14]
Category: MCIU
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-10-22
Updated: 2010-10-22
Packaged: 2017-10-12 19:55:36
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,114
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/128463
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/JoAsakura/pseuds/JoAsakura
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>a woman needs to know her priorities.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Worldbuilding 15: A Day in the Life of Domino

5:00 AM:

Dom notices that the alarm seems to get a little harsher every year. As she gets up, listening to the cartilage pop in her neck as she stretches, she turns over in her mind (and not for the first time) that maybe she's getting too old for this.

Still, her body moves with practiced ease into a combination of yoga and tai chi forms that limbers her up for the day. By the end, her mind is clear and her stomach is growling. Most of the mercs she's known over the years- the successful ones, the surviving ones- all have routines they follow closely when they can.

Outside, a car honks and there's the rumble of garbage collection as Brooklyn wakes up around her.

6:00 AM:

The building, with it's neat little courtyard and 19th century ironwork peeking out behind too many layers of old and probably lead-based paint, is silent compared with the slowly rousing bustle outside. It's a prime piece of Park Slope real estate, set on a corner overlooking the park. Nominally, it's owned, like many other similar buildings around the world, by Gwat Pai Properties, based in Hong Kong.

In reality, though, Gwat Pai is a front, a nonexistent company that Dom created to buy and maintain her safe houses. It's not cheap, and it's not like weapons and bullets are either, but she's made more than a tidy sum over the years, and a few good investments that should keep her going even when she finally retires fully from the Life.

The building is ostensibly populated with several families, at least from the names on the mailboxes, and the mail in them. These too, are shells. Domino's paranoia runs deep and hard-earned. The only one living in the building is her, and when she sits down in her dressing room, freshly showered and a sludge-green smoothie at hand, she decides who she wants to be for her commute into Manhattan.

6:30 AM:

Today, it's Beatriz Cruz riding the C Train into the city, tanned skin, frosted curls and flashy gold hoops disguising Dom's pallor. Her uniform and service weapons (the ones registered with the City and the feds, hardly scratching the surface of the armory she's got back home) tucked into a gaudy Juicy Couture duffel.

When some idiot tries to pick her pocket, she makes bashing his head against one of the poles in the subway car look like an accident and pops her gum loudly before sliding out with the crowd at 4th Street.

8:15 AM:

Cable's morning briefing never even gets off the ground as a hostage situation calls the team into play. It's not long before she finds herself looking through the scope of a sniper rifle into what would be a normal apartment, under other circumstances. The man is angry, violent. His girlfriend and daughter both mutants according to the neighbours- no earth-shattering powers, just faintly colour-changing lizard skin. But the fact that they're mutants nonetheless has brought X-Force into the fray and the local precinct and SWAT Team are fuming.

Through her radio, Dom listens to all of it. Outside the apartment, Guy and Terry are carefully talking down the man. It may work, Dom thinks. Guy's powers let him accurately read the chemical stew of fear and crazy in the apartment and Terry's modulating her sonics to make his words all the more persuasive. In her ear, a voice crackles. "I've got the shot." Shatterstar, on another rooftop. He's not crazy about guns, but she trained him and she knows, as dishonourable as he finds a head shot, he'll drop the man without a second thought.

"Hold." Dom whispers. "I think they've got him."

Afterwards, no one dead and the man hauled off to jail, Dom thinks "this was a good morning."

 

Noon:

She's spent the rest of the morning charming the police commissioner and soothing the hurt feelings of the SWAT boys. Acceptance of mutant cops has been a slow and lurching road, and occasionally, she curses Nate for talking her into this. She spent more than a couple years as X-Force's den mother the first time around, and she swore after they disbanded that she was done with that nonsense.

But as she pushes papers around her desk and absently picks at a cup of chili, she thinks to herself that really, maybe this isn't so bad.

3:00 PM:

It's not really a day unless intra-team violence comes crashing through the office, Dom thinks to herself as she breaks up a fight between Warpath and Thornn. She doesn't ask what it's about, she doesn't even care, but one throw lands Lucia in the showers at just the right angle to turn on the cold water, and another sends Jimmy face-planting on the tile.

There's a brief round of scattered golf-applause from the rest of the team, and Sam hauls Jimmy to his feet and tosses Lucia a towel.

Before Dom can escape, both parties set on her to explain what happened and Dom is reminded why she was done with the Den Mother routine the first time.

 

7:00 PM

Jimmy and Lucia are crouched over their beers, drunkenly working on some sort of elaborate flow chart written out on bar napkins.

Dom sips her club soda and rolls her eyes before sliding into a booth next to Nate. They know each other too long and too well for any sort of flirting but their schedules haven't been compatible for ages and with the dim light playing off the blunt edges of his face and the soft scratch of his stubble on her hand as she brushes his cheek, Dom realises how very badly she wants to bring him home and shag the living hell out of him.

And apparently that thought is a little too close to the surface because, even as Nate turns to her with a knowing little grin, she can hear Monet choke on her drink in the next booth.

10:00 PM

The nice thing, Dom thinks, about owning an entire building is that you can start ripping each other's clothes off in the lobby and no one cares. Nate knows the drill when they go back to Dom's place- arriving separately with her back in her Beatriz drag and him cloaked telepathically from prying eyes.

But once inside, all bets are off, and there's a trail of clothing that Dom will have to reacquire, with an unhappy grumble in the morning, that leads up two flights of stairs to her favoured apartment.

The guns, however, make it upstairs with her.

A lady needs to know her priorities.


End file.
